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With a view to improving cloud adoption in India, IT major IBM is pitching its cloud-based infrastructure and platform services for start-ups. It is coming out with its latest edition of SmartCamp, a challenge for start-ups, in India in the next two weeks.
Being taken up as part of its Global Entrepreneur Programme (GEP), the IBM SmartCamp is a business-to-business challenge for start-ups that are less than five years old. The winners would get cloud credits spread across 12 months.
Of the 280 start-ups that pitched in for the challenge last year, IBM picked six for the programme.
“It will be rolled out across nine cities in the next two weeks, calling for entries from start-ups to take part in the challenge,” Vivek Malhotra, Director, Cloud Leader, IBM India & South Asia, told BusinessLine over phone from Bengaluru.
“The best start-ups in the B2B segment would get them to pitch before top venture capital firms and senior IBM executives,” he said.
US exposureIBM teams would go to Kochi, Hyderabad, Chennai, Visakhapatnam, Ahmedabad, Pune, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Delhi. The firm tied up with Kieretsu Forum, a leading global angel investment body, to let the winners get an exposure to angel investors in the Silicon Valley and New York. The challenge is likely to be launched on September 8.
Quoting Evans Data Corp, he said India currently is ranked second in terms of number of developers. It has 2.75 million developers second only to the US that has 3.6 million. “This number is expected to grow to 5.2 million by 2018, surpassing the US,” he said.
“But the adoption of cloud in India is very low with less than 25 per cent of developers working on cloud-based solutions. We would like to see more developers and start-ups taking to the cloud,” he said.
Under the GEP, the hand-picked start-ups would get access to IBM’s “enterprise-class” cloud platforms and services for free. “It provides access to over 100 services offered by IBM, helping the start-ups to rapidly move from idea to application development,” he said.
The GEP has two components. While the early stage start-ups under five years would get $2,000 worth cloud credits a month for a year. The growth stage start-ups would get $10,000 worth offerings a month for a year.
Each of these credits would have two parts – 50 per cent each for Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service.
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